Between Suryavarman II's, death around 1150 and Jayavarman VII's coronation in 1181, only one date Cambodia inscription has survived.what we know about this period must be filtered through inscriptions carved at jayavarman's behest,reflecting his view of the world as well as what he wanted people to believe about his early life,because he was not apparently an entirely legitimate contender for the throne,his early years,like those of so many Cambodia founder-King,are poorly documented.
Jayavarman's biography was pieced together by George,who saw him as a pinnacle of Cambodia History rather than an aberration, Jayavarman's inscriptions and what they tell us about his point of view make radical departures in many ways, from what had gone before. because of this radicalism and grandeur,Jayavarman VII has tended to dominate the historiography of Cambodia .particularly sine's Geoge work in the 1930s,his Reign,as well shall see contained several mysteries and contradictions.
Jayavarman appears to have been a first cousin of Suryavarman II and the son of a Royal prince.Dharanindravarm,who may have Reigned briefly as King and who was certainly a fervent Buddhist,Groslier has cast doubts on the first of these assertion because it is not poorly documented and because it place Jayavarman in the direct line of succession in a way that makes the fact we know about his life even more difficult to understand.
It seem likely,all the same,that Jayavarman as a young man served in some capacity at Yasovarman's Court,from 1166 to 1177,Jayavarman appears to have lived a way from Angkor,perhaps in the vicinity of the temple now known as the Preah-Khan ប្រាសាទបាកានមានឈ្មោះដើមហៅថាជ័យស្រីប្រាសាទនេះកសាងដោយព្រះបាទសុរិយវរ្ម័នទី១ (គស១០០២១០៥០) លើបូជនីយដ្ឋានចាស់របស់ព្រះបាទយសោវរ្ម័នទី១ និងមានបន្ថែមរចនាបថមុខ៤ខ្លះដោយព្រះបាទជ័យវរ្ម័នទី៧មុនពេលឡើងគ្រងរាជនៅអង្គរ (គស១១៨១)ដែលព្រះអង្គបានកសាងប្រាសាទនេះដើម្បីតំកល់អដ្ឋិធាតុញាតិវង្សនិងព្រះបរមគ្រូរបស់ព្រះអង្គ in Kompong Svay, a portrait statue of him,manifestly younger than others produced later in his Reign,has found at this location, the dimensions of the temple and its carving provide evidence of the evolution of Cambodia artistic styles and also suggest that even in semi exile,Jayavarman was able to exercise systematic control over a sizable pool of labor,was the city of Preah-Khan subservient to Angkor or a rival to it? how did Jayavarman more important,what were his relationships with Cham to the East? It is important to ask these unanswerable questions in in order to place Jayavarman's Reign, following his accession in 1178 ,into the context of his early life and in the framework of Cambodia foreign relations.
Jayavarman VII and Buddhist Kingship
Throughout his time of waiting to be King.Jayavarman immersed himself in the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism- the variant still followed in much of Northern Asia,more than any other King,he labored to integrate Buddhist notions with Cambodia ideas of Kingship,Buddhist Kingship,as he practiced it, differed in several way from the more electric Hindu model that had been followed for centuries at Angkor and was to form the basic ceremonially of Cambodia
Kingship until it was overturned in the 1970s, in the traditional version, a King, alive or dead was thought to enjoy a special relationship with a particular deity- usually Siva, more rarely Vishnu,occasionally the composite of them both known as Harihara -to whom his temple-mountain was eventually dedicated , the King used this special relationship to explain their grandeur while their subjects assumed that the relationship had something to do with the provision of adequate rainfall.
Because Cambodia society was hierarchically organized,and because the King was thought to centralize the Kingdom.Most Cambodia's like their contemporaries in medieval Europe-probably recognized the necessity for a King.rare inscriptions and perhaps the act of constructing reservoirs-indicated that an individual King occasionally had his subjects welfare on his mind. in Human terms,however, the King was nearly always a distant,mysterious figure concealed inside an awesome Palace , the notion that he was accountable to his people expressed, for example ,in Royal audiences does not seem to have caught hold,despite the King's involvement in providing,patronage for the elite ,inside his Palace and within the network of Kinship and preferment relations extending from it. the King was the Master and the Victim of a system whereby people clamored for his favors, for titles, for the right to own slaves or sumptuous possessions.
Buddhist Kingship.of course, grew out of this Indian tradition (the Buddha had been an Indian Prince) but in Jayavarman's Reign these notions were modified in several ways.Jayavarman was no longer seen as the devotee of a divinity or as drawn up to the divinity in death,instead,Jayavarman sought to redeem himself and his Kingdom by his devotion to Buddhist teachings, and by the performance of meritorious acts.
Before examining how these ideas of Kingship acted themselves out during the Reign of Jayavarman.it is important to stress that his program was not aimed at performing,Cambodia Society or at dismantling such"Hinduized' institutions as Brahmanism.slavery and Kingship,far from it ,in his conservatism and his elitist frame of reference ,Jayavarman VII was a recognizably twelfth century King,although in Cambodia terms he was a revolutionary one,Put very starkly,the difference between Buddhist King and a Hindu one resembles the difference between a monologue that no one overhears
and soliloquy addressed to an audience of paid or invited guests,A'Hindu" King's rule was an aggregation of statement rituals, Temples,Poems,Marriages, Inscriptions, and the like and his grandeur and Godliness.A Buddhist King made a similar statements, but he addressed them,specifically,to an audience consisting of his people,this made the the people less an ingredient of the King's magnificence(as a thousands of slaves had always been)than objects of his overwhelming compassion,
an audience for his merit-making and participants in his Redemption,this is at least ,what may Jayavarman VII's inscriptions and Temples appear to have been saying.
Why did Jayavarman VII's choose to breaking so sharply with the past ? Scholars have been given several explanations ,these include his apparent estrangement from the Court at Angkor,combined with his resentment of the usurper who had proclaimed himself King in 1167 ,A "Master Plan" of Buildings,Ideology, and Kingship that had been maturing in his mind,after years of study ,and very possibly,the influence of a scholarly.Ambitious Wife, these proposals are helpful,but they do not identify the real key to Jayavarman's Reign- The Cham invasion of Angkor in 1177, as Paul Mus and Jean Boisselier have shown ,we can see Jayavarman entire Reign as a response to this traumatic event.
Jayavarman's own links with Champa appear to have been close,and in the 1166s,he apparently spent several years there,was he a hostage,an exile,or leading a military campaign? perhaps his absence was connected in some way with being out of favor at the Cambodia Court , for he returned home only after Yasovarman II had been deposed ,as the sources of our uncertainty are Jayavarman's own inscriptions,all that is clear about the prelude to the Cham invasion of 1177 and indeed about Jayavarman's early career -is that later on he found little to boast about in these obviously formative years.
Because inscriptions tent to trace the causes of War to Royal ambition, treachery,and revenge -that is ,to the world of the Ramayana -it is difficult for us to determine exactly why Champa invaded Cambodia . by land in 1177 and then by water in 1178, the prospects of booty and prisoners were certainly part of the Cham rationale,so were memories of early defeats ,two Chinese,shipwrecked off the Coast of Champa, apparently helped the Cham in both campaigns one taught them to fire crossbows while mounted on horseback,and the Cham King's enthusiasm for this tactic led him to raid the Chinese mainland and the island of Hainan in search of horses,not finding enough of them, Chinese sources assert, he decided on a second attack by sea, this time with the Aid of a Chinese navigator,who piloted the expedition up the Mekong,the Great Lake,and the Siam-Reap River,taking the City of Yasodharapura by surprise,with a powerful fleet,[He] pillaged it and put King to Death,without listening to any proposal of peace.
Jayavarman's where about in 1177 are unknown,but he appears to have done nothing about invasion,in1178,however,he gathered arm and supporters for a new campaign against the Chams, defeating them in another naval Battle,although an inscription suggests that a Cambodia Prince- not Jayavarman himself -Killed the Cham King " with a hundred million arrows" when Jayavarman went to Angkor after the invasion,he found the City"Plunged in to the sea of misfortune" and heavy with Crimes" some of these troubles could be trace to the enumerators Reign of predecessors ,other to the fictionalization of power inside the Kingdom,referred to in an inscription written by his Wife,in the previous Reigns , the land though shaded by many parasols suffered from extremes of heat,under Jayavarman there remained but on parasol,and yet the Land,remarkably was delivered from suffering.
Jayavarman VII was crowned in 1181.therefore ,owing little to his predecessors and much,as his inscriptions tell us,to his acumen,his Buddhist Faith,and his victories in Battle,over the next thirty years or so (The precise date of his death is unknown) he stamped the Kingdom with his personality and his Ideas as no other ruler was able to do before Norodom Sihanouk in the 1960s,and Pol-Pot in late 1970s, like these later figures,Jayavarman may have wanted to transform Cambodia and perceived himself as the instrument of the transformation.
Much of the interest in his Reign,more over springs from the tension inherent in the words"Buddha"
and "King" using the Hinduism apparatus of Kingship and the material grandeur associated with it, Jayavarman also sought in all humility- if his people from suffering,as a King ,he had roads built throughout his Kingdom.perhaps to accelerate his military response to apprising or invasions, as a Buddhist.these roads were evidence of his beneficence,his program of public.words indeed, was probably more extensive than that of many other Camboadian King,this nationalization of Kingship by a man who was arguably the most otherworldly of Cambodia's King has given Jayavarman Reign"s ,a contra-dictionary appearance sentences about the man soon fall into the pattern of"On the one Hand" and " One the other ".
For example,many of bas -reliefs on the Bayon, depicting Battles against the Chams,Contain Vivid scenes of cruelty,Similarly,some of Jayavarman's inscriptions Praise his vengefulness and his skill at Political in fighting the Chams, on the one hands, the numerous portrait statues of him that have come down to us depict him as an ascetic deep in meditation.from his inscriptions.we learn that"He" suffered from the illness of his subjects more than from his own,the pain that afflicted men's bodies was for him a spiritual pain, and thus more piercing. And yet his Road ,Temples,Rest-Houses,Reservoirs,and Hospitals were thrown up with extraordinary haste between his coronation in 1181,and the second decade of the thirteenth century,there were so many of them in fact,that workmanship was often sloppy,and by the end of Reign local supplies of sandstone and limestone for use at Angkor had run out,hundred of thousands of ordinary people, inscription tell us,labored to erect and maintain these contractions built,at the ideological level,to deliver them from pain, to a twentieth century eye ,this seems ironic to say the least,but we should remembers that suffering in Buddhist terms should not be taken merely in a physical sense, it must also be related to the purposes of life and to the ways that suffering to Praise the Buddha by building Jayavarman's City,for example,assured the workers of less suffering and greater happiness in another life.
Why was Jayavarman's building program carried out with so much haste ? he was an elderly man-perhaps as old as sixty-when he reached the throne ,the buildings may have been parts of his race against time,A more speculative answer is that in his years away from Angkor he had conceived a Buddhist-Oriented contruction program that that could only be completed,and had to be completed, at Angkor while he was still alive, the program may have been part of a process of personal redemption although the sins for which ha was atoning are not clarified by his inscriptions written at a later stage It seem that these years were probably spent in deflecting yet another Cham attack( depicted as a naval battle in the bas-reliefs of the Bayon) in quelling a rebellion in the Northwest,and in rebuilding the City of Angkokr.Major shifts in population,as usual followed these military campaigns ,as the Praeh Khan inscription of 1191 suggest, to the multitude of his warriors he gave the Capital of enemy Kings,with their shinning Palace to the beast roaming his forest, he gave the forest of the enemy to prisoners of war he gave his own forest ,thus manifesting generosity and Justice.
As with other Cambodian King's,it would be wrong to make a sharp distinction between Jayavarman'
s politics and his religion,between temporal and spiritual powers ,and between his ideas about himself and his ideas about his Kingdom,before dismissing him as a mindless megalomaniac,however,it is worth recalling that had no one shared his version or believed in his merit,he would never have become King.especially starting out from such as a weak position and certainly would not have able to remain in power,high officials Brahmans,evangelical Buddhists,and military men probably saw advantages and not entirely otherworldly ones,in the physical expansion of the Kingdom, partly by mean of Royally subsidized religious foundations partly by bringing previously indifferent populations under some form of Angkorean control ,by the beginning of thirtieth century, in fact, Angkor was extracting tribute from much of what is now Thailand and Southern Laos as well as from Champa,occupying the coastal areas of central Viet Nam, to these corners of the know world- and to China, to which the King sent tributary missions the multiple half-smiling Face of Jayavarman's,temple mountain and his portrait statues addressed their benignly powerful glance.
The art historian Philip stern,who studied Jayavarman's Reign in great detail ,perceived three stages in the development of his iconography and architecture. these coincide with the three phrases of construction noted by Stern for earlier Cambodia King,Namely Public,Works temples in honor of parents and the King's own temple-Mountain.
The Public works of earlier Kings, as we have seen, usually took the form of reservoirs (Baray) other projects such as Road and Bridges may have been built,but they are seldom noted inscriptions,Jayavarman's program departed from the past, his Hospitals,probably established early in the Reign,were built to the West of Angkor and as far North as central Laos, the Ta Prohm inscription say that these Hospitals could call on the services of 838 Villages,with adult populations totaling roughly eighty thousand people, the services demanded appear to have been to provide labor and rice for the staffs attached to each hospital, or approximately a hundred people ,including dependents the so called hospital inscriptions give detail about the Administration of the hospitals and about the provisions and staffs allocated to them.
A second set of Jayavarman VII's public works consisted of rest-houses placed at approximately 16 Km (10 mile) intervals a long Cambodia's major roads, there were fifty-seven of these between Angkor and the Cham capital and seventeen more between Ankor and a Buddhist Temple-site at Pimai in Northern Thailand ,Finally,there was Jayavarman's own reservoir ,known now as the Northern Barray and during his Reign as the Jayatataka,located to the Northern of yasodharapura.
These invasions stemmed from what Jayavarman saw as his mission to rescue his subjects,as the hospital inscription says:
"Filled with a deep sympathy for the good of the world,the King swore this oath,all the being who are plunged in the ocean of existence,may I draw them out by virtue of this good work,and may the King of Cambodia who come after me,attached to goodness..attain with their wives,dignitaries and friends the place of deliverance where there is no more illness."
The End of Jayavarman VII and the Crisis:
